Skip to Main Content
Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition
book

Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition

by Jan Goyvaerts, Steven Levithan
August 2012
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
609 pages
19h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Tools for Working with Regular Expressions

Unless you have been programming with regular expressions for some time, we recommend that you first experiment with regular expressions in a tool rather than in source code. The sample regexes in this chapter and Chapter 2 are plain regular expressions that don’t contain the extra escaping that a programming language (even a Unix shell) requires. You can type these regular expressions directly into an application’s search box.

Chapter 3 explains how to mix regular expressions into your source code. Quoting a literal regular expression as a string makes it even harder to read, because string escaping rules compound regex escaping rules. We leave that until Recipe 3.1. Once you understand the basics of regular expressions, you’ll be able to see the forest through the backslashes.

The tools described in this section also provide debugging, syntax checking, and other feedback that you won’t get from most programming environments. Therefore, as you develop regular expressions in your applications, you may find it useful to build a complicated regular expression in one of these tools before you plug it in to your program.

RegexBuddy

RegexBuddy (Figure 1-1) is the most full-featured tool available at the time of this writing for creating, testing, and implementing regular expressions. It has the unique ability to emulate all the regular expression flavors discussed in this book, and even convert among the different flavors.

RegexBuddy was designed ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition

Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition

Jeffrey E.F. Friedl
Regular Expressions Cookbook

Regular Expressions Cookbook

Jan Goyvaerts, Steven Levithan

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449327453Supplemental ContentErrata Page